Reaching the Finish Line

I just finished writing a game for the Christian Developers Network’s speedgame competition. It’s a work in progress but I posted the results on this website for anyone that reads my blog. You can check it out here. If you are interested in grabbing the source code then check out the speedgame competiton page.

Read on for my postmortem.

The Good

I started development with a tool I was fairly proficient in, HaXe. This helped lower my programming time since I didn’t have to learn any new tricks. The tools for open source flash development are getting to be pretty stable and I didn’t have to spend a lot of time setting up my development environment. Another huge asset to my development time was TextMate for the Mac. This has a simple project interface that allowed me to execute quick builds and retest in seconds.

Creating graphics is something I am not very good at, and something that took a lot of time during the last speedgame competition. Instead of creating my own graphics I did a quick search on Google for sprites and tile sets and found some excellent resources. These images combined with a feature complete tile map editor, Tiled, helped me get graphics in the game within a few hours.

The Bad

One of my weaker areas, besides graphics, is game design. The game I made is very similar to Harvest Moon and many of the things I wanted to implement I ran out of time to do. The game is mildly fun but gets repetitive in a hurry and I think with a few more days of development it could be a much more exciting game. Which brings me to my next point.

I ended up with a shortened development time since I was not aware of the competition until a week into the event. Getting a late start caused me to rush into things and design as I was programming. The end result was vastly different than my original idea and some of the code I worked on was never put into the game. I also managed to get sick during the week and had to work harder the next day to catch up.

In The End

Looking back at the last week I am impressed with how far I managed to get in such a short period of time. The final product was not as great as I envisioned but that does not stop me from continuing my work.